Add Bill Maher to small-but-loud anti-Barbie crowd.
The HBO Real Time host posted a lengthy critique of filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s summer sensation, which just crossed the $1 billion global mark at the box office.
“I was hoping it wouldn’t be preachy, man-hating, and a #ZombieLie – alas, it was all three,” Maher wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).
Here’s what Maher had to say about the Margot Robbie hit. Fair warning: The below is a tad rant-y, not entirely easy to follow, contains mild spoilers and is generally a bit of an eyeroll.
“What is a Zombie Lie? Something that never was true, but certain people refuse to stop saying it (tax cuts for the rich increase revenues, e.g.); OR something that USED to be true but no longer is, but certain people pretend it’s still true,” Maher wrote. “Barbie is this kind of #ZombieLie. Spoiler alert, Barbie fights the Patriarchy. Right up to the Mattel board who created her, consisting of 12 white men! The Patriarchy! Except there’s a Mattel board in real life, and it’s 7 men and 5 women. OK, not perfect even-steven, but not the way the board IN THE MOVIE – which takes place in 2023 – is portrayed. And not really any longer deserving of the word ‘patriarchy.’ Yes, there was one, and remnants of it remain – but this movie is so 2000-LATE.”
“At one point the Barbies have to win over the Kens, and they are told to do it by pretending to act helpless and not know how to do stuff,” Maher continued. “Helen Gurley Brown called, she wants her premise back. Yes, that WAS a thing. I saw Barbie with a woman in her 30s who said, ‘I don’t know a single woman of any age who would act like that today.’”
“I know, I know, ‘How could I know about the patriarchy, I AM a man!,’ he added. “That argument is so old and so silly. Of course, none of us can know exactly what others go through life, but I can see the world around me, and I can read data. The real Mattel board is a pretty close mirror of the country, where 45% of the 449 board seats filled last year in Fortune 500 companies were women. Truth is, I’m not the one who’s out of step – I’m living in the year we’re living in. Barbie is fun, I enjoyed it – but it IS a #ZombieLie. And people who don’t go along with zombie lies did not take some red pill – just staying true to CURRENT reality. Let’s live in the year we’re living in!”
(Note: While 45 percent of board seats filled in a recent year may have been by women, according to this report, only 30 percent of board seats in general are filled by women).
Maher is the latest male media pundit to take issue with the film, which has been tackled by several conservative voices, ranging from podcaster Ben Shapiro to billionaire Elon Musk (who wrote “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends”).
Yet the film has been an unstoppable all-quadrant hit all the same: Barbie has a big critics score (88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and almost equal audience score (84 percent) and the biggest box office haul for a live action film by a female director in cinema history.
